Eunice Kennedy Shriver

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died yesterday aged 88, was a younger sister of
the late President John F Kennedy and a tireless campaigner on behalf of the
mentally handicapped.

6:20PM BST 11 Aug 2009

In 1968 she organised the first Special Olympics, and the following year she founded the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Centre to conduct research into mental handicap and other disabilities. Each year more than a million athletes from 150 countries now compete in Special Olympics meetings. Addressing the fifth Summer Games in 1976, Eunice Shriver said: "What you are winning by your courageous efforts is far greater than any game. You are winning life itself, and in doing so you give to others a most precious prize – faith in the unlimited possibilities of the human spirit."

Eunice Shriver watching on in 1970 as participating members of the International Special Olympics parade at Soldier Field in Chicago

She was born Eunice Mary Kennedy on July 10 1921 at Brookline, Massachusetts, the fifth of nine children of Joseph P Kennedy and his wife, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.

During her father's tenure as ambassador to Britain from 1938 to 1941 she attended a Catholic boarding school in England. On her return to America she went to Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York, then on to Stanford University in California, where she read Sociology. At the convent schools where she was educated, Eunice Kennedy's devout Roman Catholicism was so pronounced that many assumed that she would become a nun.

In fact she began her career as a social worker, working with female prisoners, juvenile delinquents and abandoned children. Between 1943 and 1945 she worked for the Special War Problems Division of the American Department of State, helping to rehabilitate former prisoners of war.

It is said that she had gained controlled of a $1 million trust fund when she turned 21, and in 1947-48 she worked at the Department of Justice, specialising in juvenile delinquency, for a salary of $1 a year. She was later a social worker at a women's prison and at a young people's shelter in Chicago.

Eunice's sister Rosemary, her senior by three years, had been born with a mild mental handicap. In those days, the presence of a mentally handicapped child in a family could be a cause of embarrassment, and although the Kennedys kept Rosemary at home, they concealed her condition from the outside world. As she grew into adulthood, Rosemary became, in Eunice's words, "increasingly irritable and difficult", and in 1941 – without consulting any other member of the family – Joe Kennedy decided that Rosemary should have a prefrontal lobotomy, a new and apparently "miraculous" surgical procedure which, he had been assured, would leave her mental functions intact while eliminating her aggressive behaviour. In the event, the operation left her so severely brain-damaged that she had to be removed to a special institution (she eventually died in 2005, aged 86). The family told inquiring reporters that she was living in a convent.

The experience had a profound effect on Joseph Kennedy, and on Eunice, who had always been close to her sister. In 1946 he created the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation (named after a son who had died in the war) to help mentally handicapped people, and 10 years later he appointed Eunice (by now married to the politician Sargent Shriver) the foundation's vice-president.

In this role she toured the United States, seeking out the small number of experts willing to challenge "out of sight, out of mind" attitudes to the mentally handicapped and visiting the notorious "snake-pits" – remote institutions where mentally handicapped children and adults were herded into bleak, overcrowded wards often containing 100 or more people. "There was a complete lack of interest in them and lack of knowledge about their capacities", she later recalled. "They were isolated because their families were embarrassed and the public were prejudiced."

When her elder brother John entered the White House in 1961, Eunice Kennedy Shriver persuaded him to establish a task force to devise a legislative programme to improve services for the mentally handicapped, and suggested the creation of new research centres to improve understanding and treatment.

She also suggested to her family that it would be helpful in changing public attitudes if they told the world about Rosemary. Accordingly, in September 1962, she revealed the truth about her sister in an article in The Saturday Evening Post. At the same time she called for a fundamental change in public attitudes, pointing out that 75 to 85 per cent of the mentally handicapped housed in bleak institutions would be capable of becoming useful citizens with the help of special education and rehabilitation.

The article immediately captured public attention, and over the years that followed mentally handicapped people began to return to their families, schools and workplaces.

In 1962 Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her husband held a day-camp for mentally handicapped children on a farm in Maryland, during the course of which she discovered that these children were more capable in sports and other activities than many gave them credit for; the following year she founded the Special Olympics movement.

In 1981 she founded Community of Caring, a programme to reduce the incidence teenage pregnancies, which were said to carry a higher risk of mental handicap. It later expanded into the areas of drug and alcohol abuse.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was an intense, fervent and religious woman, relentless in her commitment to her cause. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan conferred on her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian award.

In 1995 she became the first living woman to be depicted on an American coin when the United States Mint issued a commemorative coin bearing a portrait of her as founder of the Special Olympics.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver married Sargent Shriver in 1953; he was the first director of the Peace Corps, during the Kennedy administration, and was Senator George McGovern's vice-presidential running-mate in the 1972 American presidential elections and a United States ambassador to France. They had four sons and a daughter, Maria Shriver, a former NBC television journalist who married the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, now Governor of California.